Syria seemed like a tempest in a teapot. Another Libya in the making. Pax Americana would stomp over Syria.

Except this time, the Russians were back.

Back again.

Does such propaganda work? | Cartoon by Steve Breen on August 29, 2011 in utsandiego.com

Prince Bandar bin Sultan flew into Moscow. His conversation with Vladimir Putin is a study in how diplomacy is not done. Give us Syria, said Bandar, and take the world. It was like the Biblical yarn about the Devil tempting Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” said Christ, refusing the blandishments. When Bandar offered all the guarantees for a “terror free” Sochi Winter Olympic games next year, Putin said we know you control terrorists.

This amazing conversation was supposed to be under wraps but one of the two sides leaked it to the Russian press. Bandar’s other startling undertaking was that whatever he offered the Russians had American backing.

This was the trump card Bandar handed Putin at the global casino’s high table.

Tracing back the sources of explosives is muddied by serious and deliberate leakages and clandestine sales.

US, the world’s largest arms’ exporter, spreads the fertilizer of arms and ammuninution, which creates conflicts – and then US steps in to resolve these conflicts | Cartoon by Polyp.

Boom & Explosions

Ordinary gunpowder, is no longer a high-tech secret. Mix diesel, common nitrate fertilizer and sulfur, all commonly available items, and you get gunpowder.

Things were different a hundred years ago. India was the largest producer of this high tech product – and the British Empire rested on its ability to exclusively access Indian production of gunpowder elements. Within India, gunpowder was commonly available – and manufactured in the private sector, without State control.

In the last 50 years, we have seen a new explosive. Plastic explosive. Like wet clay or plasticine in texture, and stable, it has much more explosive power compared to ordinary gunpowder. Many terrorist incidents in India reported use of plastic explosives. An item with restricted access and limited manufacture, usage of plastic explosive usually signifies State involvement.

Known by various names like C4, Semtex (a mix of RDX & PETN), visual identification is easy. C4 leaves off-white traces on the debris and Semtex has a tell-tale brick-red color.

Agents and double agents | Cartoon by by Dave Coverly; 31 May, 2012

There Goes The Neighborhood

We had David Coleman Headley, a CIA-DEA American agent, who was deeply involved in the Mumbai attacks. US has more troops in Asia than other part of the world – except Europe. While Europe has a 500-year history of wars, to justify this US army role, where is the need in Asia?

Except the imposition of Pax Americana?

US is today at war with Pakistan – next door to India. After deluding Pakistan for 50 years, US the ally has started war with Pakistan. Neither US nor Pakistan has admitted they are at war – yet American drones have been killing Pakistanis for years now.

In Pakistan, this class of explosives are made by Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) and Wah Nobel, a 1962-joint venture between Almisehal (Saudi Arabia), Saab (Sweden) and Pakistan Ordnance Factories.

Making The Wheels Go Round

US is the world’s largest arms producer and exporter. These clandestine sales and furtive supplies have been done by arms agents like Viktor Bout or Wilson.

NOTHING about Edwin P. Wilson was quite as it appeared. If you met him at an airport—en route to Geneva, London, New York, on joking terms with the Concorde stewardesses—he looked like any other globetrotting businessman. In fact, he was a spy.

His chief business in the 1970s was shipping arms to Libya, then under Western sanctions. He didn’t advertise it. But then again, he claimed later, it wasn’t what it seemed. He sold Muammar Qaddafi firearms. But that was done to “buddy up” to him, to try to use him like an asset. He offered him plans for making a nuclear bomb, but only to find out how Libya’s own bomb-making was going. The plans were bogus anyway. He recruited ex-Green Berets to train Qaddafi’s intelligence officers, and to teach them to make bombs disguised as bedside lamps and radios. He earned $1m a year from that, but also learned the officers’ identities. It was all done with CIA backing. These were patriotic acts.

Most spectacularly—and disastrously for his cover—in 1977 he shipped to Libya 20 tons of C4 plastic explosives. This was almost the whole of America’s stockpile, flown out of Houston in a DC-8 charter in barrels marked “oil-drilling mud”. Mr Wilson felt no qualms about it. He didn’t believe it had been used for terrorism. He had sent it to ingratiate himself and to get intelligence. The CIA, he said, knew all about it. But the CIA denied it.

He worked actively for the CIA for 15 years, destabilising European labour unions by using anything—Corsican mobsters, plagues of cockroaches—and setting up his front companies. The work was “a hell of a satisfaction” to him. He left, officially, in 1971, but only for Task Force 157 of the Office of Naval Intelligence, another super-secret outfit.

Then, in 1976, he went “freelance”. The CIA contacts, and all the front companies, continued—sending arms to Angola and boats to the Congo, bringing intelligence back—right up to the moment when he stood in a federal court, in 1983, accused among other things of shipping the explosives and sending the guns to Libya without a licence.

The third-highest CIA officer in the land declared then, in a sworn affidavit, that since 1971 the agency had had nothing to do with him. Not directly; not indirectly. Contacts zero.

The CIA’s story was that he had gone rogue. Deniability was part of the deal, of course. But it was sheer success that made him, in the end, “a little hot”. His front companies were also legitimate businesses, and they made real profits—all the more because his books were hardly audited. Asked once to itemise the cost of a trawler stuffed with surveillance gear, sold to the agency for $500,000, he quoted $250,000 for “product” and $250,000 for “service”. Fine and dandy. Kinglike, and worth $23m, he rollicked over a 2,500-acre estate at Mount Airy in Virginia, lavishing jewels on his girlfriends, entertaining congressmen and generals to picnics and hunting parties.

Not bad for a poor farm boy from Idaho. There were “very, very nice” villas, with Pakistani houseboys, in Malta and in Tripoli,

His revenge for his framing came almost too late. In 2003 his conviction for the explosives-shipping was overturned because, wrote the judge, the government had lied. Far from no contacts with the CIA between 1971 and 1978, there had been at least 80. Several ran intriguingly “parallel” to the illegal acts he had been charged with. The next year he was released, white-haired at 76, fighting fit and pumped up with his own righteousness, to spend the rest of his days trying to clear his name.

He knew that would be a tough sell. For many he would always be a traitor and a terrorist as well as an amoral profiteer.

Are American lives the only lives that are of value? The most valuable? Do the deaths of other peoples, count? At all …

After 100 years of mal-intentions towards the Islamic world, what does the US expect? Milk of human kindness from Pakistan? | Cartoon by Daryl Cagle; source and courtesy – msnbc.msn.com | Click for image.

Rhetoric apart

Is there is a difference in the value of a life?

Is an African life less valuable than an Asian life? Is a European life worth more than an Asian life? Are South American lives of no consequence, compared to US lives?

It appears so!

Lives less valuable

Thirty years after the Vietnam war ended, and forty years after the Vietnam war became serious, American media counts only 60,000 Americans killed. American media conveniently glosses over the 20 lakhs Vietnamese killed.

US soldiers trying to prop up the house of cards that Bush made | Cartoon by Clay Bennett; taking off on the iconic Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima Pulitzer Prize photograph taken on February 23, 1945, of US Marines raising the US flag | Click for image.

Below is an excerpt from an interview with George Bush Jr., and Oprah Winfrey. Both Bush and Oprah talk of only the American dead.

What of the Iraqis? Libyans? Or the Viets!

Vietnam, Iraq or Libya did not invade USA.

As the invader, the responsibility of all killings and deaths in the war is with USA.

Although weapons of mass destruction were never found, President Bush says inspectors reported that Hussein was still very dangerous. “We may not have found the vials, but he had the capacity to make weapons,” he says. “The point I make is that Saddam Hussein in power today would mean the world would be less stable and more dangerous, and 25 million Iraqis would be living under the thumb of a brutal, ruthless dictator. My point is the world’s better with him gone.”

In 2007, President Bush made another controversial decision and ordered the deployment of more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. Since the war began, 4,421 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives—a fact the former commander in chief says weighs on him.

“It weighs heavily because I know that the decision I made disrupted somebody’s life in a big way,” he says. “It would weigh more heavily on me, however, if I had cared more about my political standing and less about completing the mission.” (via President George W. Bush Talks About the Iraq War – Oprah.com).

For the last 30 years, US has been placing zero value on Afghan lives – starting with President Reagan | Cartoonist Kevin Siers / The Charlotte Observer (March 20, 2012); source: McClatchy | Click for image.

Invasion of Iraq and Libya would have been justifiable if killings were to lessen.

Measured by numbers of people killed, Saddam and Gaddafi killed fewer people than the wars initiated by Pax Americana.

The most serious charge against Saif al-Islam Gaddafi that Libya managed to back with evidence is over his failure to obtain a license for his camels, the head of Human Rights Watch says.

Kenneth Roth cited on his Twitter account complaints of lawyers of the International Criminal Court, who said the case of Saif is a “legal black hole”.

According to the lawyers, Libya said it would not charge “serious crimes, such as murder & rape, due to lack of evidence” and has only managed to charge him with “the absence of a licence for camels, and irregularities concerning fish farms” so far.

The ICC forcefully demanded that Saif al-Islam were extradited to The Hague earlier on Thursday. But the Libyan government refused to do so, insisting that it will try him on its soil.

Go East, young man

And here is one more take on the gold prices which seems to suggest that with Asian (read as India+China) demand strong as ever, this dip in prices is just a good buying opportunity.

2ndlook will go with that.

Paradoxically, optimism is actually bolstered by the widespread suspicion the slide was triggered by central bank selling — a once-radical idea now so generally accepted that the bullion bank UBS, usually very circumspect about official-sector activity, felt able to say on Friday that “larger moves were also likely taking place behind the scenes, judging from the considerable market chatter about official liquidation.”

The reasoning here: Once the abnormal, politically motivated selling ceases, gold will revert to a higher equilibrium.

But the most concrete reason for optimism emerged on Friday: It became apparent that the lows of Thursday had uncovered large Eastern physical demand.

UBS commented that “the physical market has now responded: Combined turnover on the [Shanghai Gold Exchange] this week has been consistently strong and is about 53% higher than the previous week’s, while demand from India is shaping up to be the strongest weekly offtake since early October.”

Over at LeMetropoleCafe, a correspondent reported very high local premiums for gold in the key gold-buying markets of China and India on Friday, suggesting strong local demand, and headlined: “Year-end gold menu: Bear Curry or Bear Chow Mein?” (via The East Is Gold? – Peter Brimelow – MarketWatch).

Average prices of gold in February 2011, were in the region of US$45 million per tonne of gold. That would be 2000 tons – one of the largest hoards in the world. More gold than the national reserves of any country – except the Top 5 reserves.

Just carting around 2000 tons of gold – or its cash equivalent would be inviting trouble.

Why does every US military intervention end up with politics dependent on terrorism and economies subverted by drugs?

The neo-colonial mirage. Does Libya own its oil – now or then, too! | Graphic source and courtesy – http://thesantosrepublic.com | Click for larger source image.

A large Benghazi-based “revolution” sold to the West as a popular movement was always a myth. Only two months ago the armed “revolutionaries” barely numbered 1,000. NATO’s solution was to build a mercenary army – including all sorts of unsavory types, from former Colombian death squad members to recruiters from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who pinched scores of unemployed Tunisians and tribals disgruntled with Tripoli. All these on top of the CIA mercenary squad – Salafis in Benghazi and Derna – and the House of Saud squad – the Muslim Brotherhood gang.

It’s hard not to be reminded of the UCK drug gang in Kosovo – the war NATO “won” in the Balkans. Or of the Pakistanis and Saudis, with US backing, arming the “freedom fighters” of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Then there’s the dodgy, Benghazi-based, Transitional National Council (TNC)’s cast of characters.

The leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, Gaddafi’s justice minister from 2007 until his resignation on February 26, studied sharia and civil law at the University of Libya. That might entitle him to cross rhetorical swords with the Islamic fundamentalists in Benghazi, al-Baida and Delna – but he could use his knowledge to press their interests in a new power-sharing arrangement.

As for Mahmoud Jibril, the chairman of the council’s executive board, he studied at Cairo University and then the University of Pittsburgh. He’s the key Qatari connection – having been involved in asset management for Sheikha Mozah, the ultra high-profile wife of the emir of Qatar.

There’s also the son of the last monarch of Libya, King Idris, deposed by Gaddafi 42 years ago (with no bloodshed); the House of Saud would love a new monarchy in northern Africa. And the son of Omar Mukhtar, the hero of the resistance against Italian colonialism – a more secular figure.

The new Iraq?

Yet to believe that NATO would win the war and let the “rebels” control power is a joke. Reuters has already reported that a “bridging force” of around 1,000 soldiers from Qatar, the Emirates and Jordan will arrive in Tripoli to act as police. And the Pentagon is already spinning that the US military will be on the ground to “help to secure the weapons”. A nice touch that already implies who’s going to be really in charge; the “humanitarian” neo-colonialists plus their Arab minions.

Abdel Fatah Younis, the “rebel” commander killed by the rebels themselves, was a French intelligence asset. He was killed by the Muslim Brotherhood faction – just when the Great Arab Liberator Sarkozy was trying to negotiate an endgame with Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s London School of Economics son now back from the dead.

So the big winners in the end are London, Washington, the House of Saud and the Qataris (they sent jets and “advisers”, they are already handling the oil sales). With a special mention for the compound Pentagon/NATO – considering that Africom will finally set up its first African base in the Mediterranean, and NATO is one step closer to declaring the Mediterranean “a NATO lake”.

Islamism? Tribalism? These may be Libya’s lesser ills compared to a new fantasyland open to neo-liberalism. There are few doubts the new Western masters won’t try to revive a friendlier version of Iraq’s nefarious, rapacious Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), turning Libya into a hardcore neo-liberal dream of 100% ownership of Libyan assets, total repatriation of profits, Western corporations with the same legal standing of local firms, foreign banks buying local banks and very low income and corporate taxes.

Meanwhile, the deep fracture between the center (Tripoli) and the periphery for the control of energy resources will fester. BP, Total, Exxon, all Western oil giants will be gratefully rewarded by the transitional council – to the detriment of Chinese, Russian and Indian companies. NATO troops on the ground will certainly help to keep the council on message. (via Asia Times Online :: THE ROVING EYE: Welcome to Libya’s ‘democracy’).

After American military interventions, many economies were subverted by drugs – and politics by terrorism. Why? | Cartoon by Charlie Daniels; source and courtesy – http://editorialexplanations.blogspot.com | Click for source image.

War, Drugs .Terror

Widely supported, trained and equipped by US and West European governments, the KLA-UCK targeted the Serbs and Roma Gypsies. Yugoslavia (now Crotia, Bosnia-Herzegovinia, Serbia, Montenegro), for long a legal drug-supplier to Europe, apparently continued this trade even after WWII, when it declared illegal.

Even though most drugs in the world originated in India; India remains a producer of these drugs – Indians are not major users. | Cartoon by Mike Keefe; on 25 March, 2009; source and courtesy – theipinionsjournal.com | Click for larger source image.

In former Yugoslavia, the Albanian mafia made $45 million annually in 1990s by controlling the Turkish drug chain from Istanbul through Zurich to New York. A large chunk of this money returned to Kosovo to finance separatist activities inside the province as well as use the money to buy sympathies from the international NGOs that will implicitly advocate Kosovo Albanian separatist agenda.

Ethnic Albanians were initiated as the couriers for the Turkish and Bulgarian state mafia thirty years ago. These used smuggling of narcotics as the source of financing secret political, military and intelligence service operations. The majority of them were recruited in the “Kosovo triangle” Veliki Trnovac-Preševo-Gnjilane, marked on Interpol map as a black point on world drug routes.

French expert on narcotics, Alen Labrus described Kosovo Albanian drug smuggling operations to the Washington Post as being managed by tough, merciless bands that have displaced Turks as the leading smuggling clan:

“Powerful Turkish clans controlling Europe heroin market, realized that Russian, Caucasian and Albanian narco-mafia have invaded their territory in the last ten years, looking for their part of the market and profit. Kosovo ethnic Albanians have become so strong that they keep under their control 70% of drug market just in Switzerland. The war in the Balkans interrupted previous Yugoslav channels of drug smuggling. (via Balkan Death: The Albanian Narco-Mafia | Serbianna Analysis).

The most serious charge against Saif al-Islam Gaddafi that Libya managed to back with evidence is over his failure to obtain a license for his camels, the head of Human Rights Watch says.

Kenneth Roth cited on his Twitter account complaints of lawyers of the International Criminal Court, who said the case of Saif is a “legal black hole”.

According to the lawyers, Libya said it would not charge “serious crimes, such as murder & rape, due to lack of evidence” and has only managed to charge him with “the absence of a licence for camels, and irregularities concerning fish farms” so far.

The ICC forcefully demanded that Saif al-Islam were extradited to The Hague earlier on Thursday. But the Libyan government refused to do so, insisting that it will try him on its soil.

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